


The Last First Time

by Luna



Category: Maleficent (2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 16:07:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5462735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Well?" she says. </p><p>"Well," he says, and hoists himself to his feet. "Just how many days does she have left to live?" </p><p>She sets him on fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last First Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dreamiflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamiflame/gifts).



> Beta notes tk. Happy Yuletide!

This morning she is hiding from the dawn. From the Moors. She would hide from Diaval, if she could. But his eyes are sharp, and his mind is made up, and so he finds her in the first place he looks. That ruined tower of some long-dead queen. He perches on the window-ledge, calls her name over and over again. Summoning her out from behind her mask, from someplace deep within herself. 

At long last she snaps her fingers and transforms him, so abruptly that he nearly falls backward out of the window. By now he knows her sense of humor, but there's no change in her expression. You would believe she'd never laughed at all.

"Well?" she says.

"Well," he says, and hoists himself to his feet. "Just how many days does she have left to live?"

She sets him on fire.

Only a few flames, singeing his coat, sizzling at his hair. He beats them out with his bare hands. Maleficent's gone when he looks up again. Taste of ash and sweat in his mouth. If she expects him to let this go, she'll have to do a lot worse.

Down the spiral stairs, then, leaping over the missing steps. Maleficent is walking away from the tower, toward the sunrise. A black shape in the blue mist. He catches up, falls into step with her too easily. Her hand is curled very tightly around her staff, as if it's the only thing holding her up. He can't recall when he ever saw her so tired. The morning after a battle, maybe. Or the first time he saw her face.

He can't wait any longer. Clears his throat. "What are we going to do?"

"We," she says, lifting an eyebrow, not even bothering to sneer properly.

"We. You. It doesn't matter who. Aurora's running out of time."

Maleficent gives him a sidelong look, out from underneath her lashes and their shadows. Sizes him up. Blinks him away. "She has time in abundance. Don't be a fool."

Her tone is cool and final, and he wants to believe her, to step into the updraft of hope, the possibility that everything will turn out all right. "I can count to sixteen," he says.

"So can any common crow," she says. "Think, Diaval. Do you even remember the curse?"

He'd prefer not to. But he does, of course he does. He remembers the great hall of the castle, the heat and held breath of the crowd, stricken faces in flickering green light. The king on his knees. The stink of human fear. Every one of them terrified, except for the baby. And even Aurora was listening, wide-eyed, Maleficent's voice an irresistible force. _She shall prick her finger on the needle of a spinning wheel--_

"A sleep like death," Maleficent says, much quieter now than in his memory. "It will keep her for a hundred years. A thousand. While everyone else grieves her, and then forgets her. While we die and are buried and forgotten in our turn."

She sweeps her cloak around herself and quickens her pace, cutting across the meadow. The mist and grass part to stay out of her way and close behind Diaval as he follows her. Her words sink into him like stones cast into water, settling deep in his chest, heavy and dark. Nothing a bird was ever meant to carry.

A shoal of tiny pixies dances along the treeline, making a pattern, a constellation. Something to show Aurora, no doubt. Maleficent walks among them and they flicker, scatter, flee. Onward into the forest, passing a tree-guard on patrol, who snaps to petrified attention. She doesn't notice. She's looking straight ahead and far away, through the forest, through the thorns. Looking all the way to the cottage. To Stefan's castle. To the coming day, and the evening, and the next day right on its heels.

How many days left? Diaval's heart is beating hard and fast, fly-away-fly-away. Instead he runs a few clumsy yards and steps in front of Maleficent, between her and whatever she sees on the horizon.

"The king is mad," he says. 

She smiles, sudden rose among her thorns. Gone almost faster than it blooms. "So you tell me."

"The queen--she's dead in the ground."

"And the west wind's a gossip," Maleficent says, "and water is wet, and if you've nothing new to tell me, I may as well turn you into something with a prettier voice."

"Not now. Please--"

"Like a donkey."

She brushes past him, starting deeper into the shadows, but he stays with her. Stays near her shoulder, close enough to whisper in her ear. This is his place. 

"They don't miss Aurora," he says. "They don't know her. They gave her away. To _those_ fairies. They might just as well have left her to be raised by pigeons. If King Stefan ever thinks of his daughter, it's only to spite you. He won't mourn her. You won't get your revenge."

There, it's said. It's out of his chest and hanging in the air. He braces for the snap of her magic, whipping him into some ugly shape. Instead she folds her hands on top of her staff and tilts her head, listening, listening to music he can't hear.

"I gave him sixteen years," she says. Her voice is calm, too calm: still waters run deep. She is not talking to Diaval. "To make his loss that much keener, I thought. He's the one who threw those years away. No, he won't mourn her. He'll never know what he's lost, what he might have had. Now that's a curse. Subtler and more powerful than even I imagined."

No birds sing, this deep in the wood. The briars are so dense that it will be hours yet before the sunlight reaches here. He shivers. As if sunlight would help. "What about us?"

She doesn't even look at him with contempt, this time. He could be talking to a stone. He should have spent the night on Aurora's windowsill. Standing guard, waiting for her to open her eyes.

"We kept her alive," he says. "We fed her and watched her and taught her how to tell blueberries from belladonna. We brought her up. What was it for?"

His throat is closing up. No tears, but only because he's never been human enough to cry. Little Aurora. Before she could speak, he understood her. He watched her discovering her own hands, opening and closing them in pure hatchling wonder. She's the only creature he's ever known--mortal or immortal, earthbound or winged--who has never been cruel.

The idea of outliving a child--

"We're the ones who'll grieve," he says. "And we won't forget."

Maleficent is always pale, but now she's paler, her face sharp and shining as a young moon, her horns a heavy crown, so black it makes the shadows fade to gray. Even the thorns shrink away from her.

"I know," she says, finally.

Yes. Of course she does. They could have, should have had this conversation sixteen years ago.

"If you let this happen--"

"What will you do, then?" A hint of amusement plays across her face, the glimmer off the edge of a knife. "Run off to the ends of the earth? Go and live as a peasant? Maybe you'll find work as a scarecrow."

"I don't know," he says. "But I won't serve you anymore."

Now she looks at him, full on, and he rather wishes she hadn't. There's too much of tomorrow in her eyes. Every instinct screams at him to fly, or at least run, run away from that terrible nameless emptiness.

"Go on, Diaval," she says, very quietly.

No. He takes a step forward. Any closer, he'd be touching her. "Lift the curse."

Impossibly, she is the one to look away. "No."

His hands are itching to tear the staff out of her strangling grip. To seize her and shake her awake. "Then put another spell on her, a stronger one. Do something to protect her. You have to--"

"I can't."

Barely above a whisper, but it echoes. He rocks backward, ready for a blow, a burst of flame.

She throws her shoulders back, standing very tall and very strong. No wind could move her. And she's trembling. "I made a stone so big I cannot lift it," she says. "I tried again last night. I called on every power that I've ever had, or known, or dreamed of. I would raze the Moors to dust if that would save her. Nothing can undo what I've done." 

Diaval opens his mouth. Closes it again. He's never really guessed at a limit to her power, never imagined that anything could lie within her desire and yet beyond her will. He never had to. Not until Aurora came through the walls Maleficent built. A slow thaw, after sixteen winters.

"I don't believe it," he says. And swallows hard, wanting it to be true.

"You are a fool," she says. But there's no danger in it, not really. When she looks at him, her face is exactly as it was the morning they met. A look strange and familiar as his own skin. I need you to be my wings, she'd said. He understands now. Maybe for the first time.

"You really can't do it, can you?"

"Some things are beyond magic," she says. "Beyond healing."

In his memory, mind's eye, he sees the map of her boundaries. "Is that why you keep the scars?"

Silence. For a very long time, nothing moves. Her eyes--her eyes are the eyes of a hurricane, filled with uncanny light, a stillness in them that can only exist at the core of a raging storm. 

She won't set him on fire, this time. She'll kill him with her bare hands.

But she must have known, surely--that he's seen her, watched her--he's always been watching her. He's a spy because she made him one, from the very start. It's why she saved his life. He's not sorry.

He is going to say this, but she stops his voice. Her hands on his throat, white-hot. His blood beats wild and desperate under the pressure of her fingertips. This is my death. This is my death.

"You're still mine," she says. And kisses him.

It's like breathing a new kind of air, kissing her. He tastes rainwater, winter fruit, the salt of a far-off sea. He had not even known to want this. Already it's not enough. She bites his lower lip, his shoulder, and when he gasps it makes no sound. What would he say if he could? Only her name.

He falls, or the earth rises to meet him. On his back, vines hooking his ankles, his wrists. Tearing at his clothes. Maleficent's fingers fly to some hidden catch between her breasts, and her dress opens, slides away from her bare skin. For one endless moment they stare at each other, heat and magic shimmering between them. 

When she lowers herself to him, her cloak falls around both of them, soft and dark, rustling like wings. There is no such thing as enough of this.

With her head thrown back, mouth open, throat bared, she is not the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, but the most important. The most real. He works one hand free of the thorns to touch her, to hold on tight. His body obeys hers. Rising and falling. Rising and rising.

It's nothing like flight, but it's the best these bodies can do.

Later--it feels like minutes, and it feels like a hundred years--she stands, away from him. Finds her staff and leans on it, facing east. He gets up and pulls his clothes together as best he can, fumbling, catching his breath. It's still dark. The longer Maleficent keeps her back turned to him, the darker it gets.

He wonders: is this what it will be like, while Aurora sleeps?

Maleficent says, "We will not speak of this again."

Diaval can't tell if this is a command, or a curse, or just a promise. He tries to answer her. Silence, silence. In the end he has to pull at her cloak to get her to turn and see him. She touches his throat once again.

"Yes, Mistress," he says.

She laughs. Her eyes are the surprised green of the first day of spring. It won't last long. There'll be another storm. But he's seen it and he won't give it back.

"To the ends of the earth," she says. "You love Aurora that much."

It hurts that she would have to ask. She must--no, she does know the answer. She's asking him to tell her anyway. And it isn't pride that keeps her from telling herself, nor even shame. The words are simply out of her reach. She needs him to be what she's lost.

Diaval looks down at his hands. Clenches them into fists, to keep himself from reaching for her. He'll need to practice that. "It's your own bloody fault," he says. "Remember what you said. _Loved by all who know her._ " 

"Perhaps," Maleficent says. "Or perhaps I merely recognized fate when it looked at me. Does it matter?"

Once she asked him if he'd rather be flightless or dead. It had seemed like a joke, the mockery of a choice. He was very young, then, and almost as foolish as Maleficent thought him. He'd never felt anything worse than a thrown stone or a hard rain. He's learned. You may be dealt your fate, but still you have to choose.

"No," he says. "It doesn't matter." Because he never would have chosen not to love her.

Maleficent draws in her breath, lifts her head. Shadows under her brows, her cheekbones, her lips dark and secret as a bruise. "She'll be awake by now."

He follows her gaze, up and up into the thorns that coil and writhe, frozen smoke. He can hardly see a fragment of the sky, but he knows she's right. The sunrise is fading, time is passing, time is _flying_. One day Aurora won't wake up. And one day he won't look back.

"Not yet," he says. Maleficent's lifting her hand, long fingers poised. The paths they drew still burning on his skin. Not yet: it's all he can swear to, all he can wish for.

"Go to her," she says, and like that, he's gone.


End file.
